This Behavior Ends More Relationships Than Any Other

Although it’s a common practice, cutting off communication, more commonly called giving someone the silent treatment, actually damages relationships more seriously and creates more conflict within relationships than most people ever thought! If your ideal is to have a healthy romantic relationship full of love and joy, you and your partner both must curb this behavior. In addition, even if you don’t cut off communication completely, falling into a pattern where you make demands and then withdraw from your partner when your demands aren’t met also wreaks havoc on your relationship and on your overall level of happiness..

What the Studies Show

Communication Monographs, an academic journal about communication and human behavior, found that withdrawing communication actually creates some of the most conflict within a relationship, and it creates a high degree of anxiety and emotional damage as well. The journal’s studies took information over the course of more than 20 years using 14,000 subjects. The study found that in addition to the emotional damage wrought by communicative withdrawal, such a pattern also became entrenched as a hard-to-break pattern within the relationship.

-Withdrawing communication creates more conflict

-Giving the silent treatment causes anxiety

-Patterns of withdrawal become harder to break as the relationship progresses

Withdrawal Breeds More Withdrawal

Paul Schrodt, who teaches communication as a professor at Texas Christian University, has spoken on how this pattern creates more anxiety among both partners and how it also creates more aggression. Partners begin to see their interactions as the beginning of an argument or problem rather than something positive.

The study published in Communication Monographs also found that people in relationships where communicative withdrawal was frequently used reported a much lower sense of satisfaction with their relationship. Couples also reported feeling fewer feelings of intimacy with their partner, more anxiety, and some even suffered from physical problems as a result of their relationship, like erectile dysfunction, for example.

-Patterns of communicative withdrawal create aggression in a relationship

-Partners feel anxious about interacting with each other

-Couples who engaged in this behavior reported lower feelings of satisfaction in their relationship;